I was telling a friend today how Live Writer was the best blogging application for Wordpress I have used. We all know you can blog via the Wordpress back end but let’s be real. When you are creating well formatted, image filled posts, writing out HTML is not exactly user friendly.
Writer can publish to Windows Live Spaces, SharePoint, WordPress, Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, Moveable Type, Community Server, and many other weblog services..
The feature set is pretty rich. Not only do you get WYSIWYG composing, but the tool itself is incredibly extensible via plugins. By default it supports all standard formatting tools, links, images, tables, maps & tags. The plugins allow support for video, screenshots, url thumbnails, etc. It’s pretty comprehensive.
When you first set up a blog, it will download your stylesheets so you can compose as it would look on your site. It takes a username, password and url and you are on your way. It can also download previous posts so you can modify them at will.
You have drafts so you can hold onto ideas until they have completely formulated. Also are quick ways to create ordered lists, unordered lists, block quotes, line breaks, etc.
Live writer also downloads all of your categories and allows you to set custom publish dates for back or forward posting. Of course there is a great built in spell checker with a learning dictionary and code view for when you just need to polish the html manually.
It’s also important to note that Live Writer lets you manage multiple blogs, this is really handy when you want to post the same thing across several sites.
If you are interested download it here.
